To the Emerging Leader: You Were Made for This
There is a letter I have been composing in my head for years.
Not to a board member. Not to a CEO. Not to the donor who didn’t call back or the campaign that almost made it.
This one is for you.
I have been in this field long enough to have watched people arrive full of energy and leave full of something harder to name. I have seen the burnout, the lateral moves, and the quiet exits that get dressed up as “pursuing other opportunities.” I have seen talented, mission-driven people decide that the work was not worth the cost.
Some of them found themselves serving missions that never truly fit, or discovered that the work was harder than anyone had prepared them for. Those are real experiences, and they deserve to be named.
But some of them left before they realized what this career could actually become. And that is the part that stays with me.
So if you are just getting started, or just getting your footing, I want to tell you the things I wish someone had told me before I figured them out the hard way.
Dear Emerging Leader,
First: this work is hard.
I do not say that to discourage you. I say it because nobody told me, and I spent years thinking something was wrong with me when I struggled. The hours are real. The emotional weight is real. The gap between what the sector says fundraising is and what it actually requires of you on a Tuesday at 6:45 in the evening is very real.
Fundraising is not a job you can leave at the office because the relationships you build do not stay at the office. You will think about donors on weekends. You will replay a conversation on your drive home, wondering if you said the right thing. You will feel the rejection personally, even when you know intellectually that a “no” is not about you.
None of that means you are doing it wrong. It means you are doing it.
The people who last in this field are not the ones who feel less. They are the ones who figure out how to carry it.
Second: choose the mission, not just the job.
I know what it feels like to take a position because the salary and timing were right, and it seemed like a logical next step. Maybe you have already done it. Maybe you are doing it right now.
Here is what I learned: you can be technically excellent at fundraising for an organization whose mission does not move you. You can craft a compelling case for support, build a strong pipeline, and hit your numbers. And you will still feel like something is missing, because something is missing.
The days this work asks the most of you — and there will be many — you will reach for something beyond strategy and skill. You will reach for belief. And if the mission has never really lived in your chest, you will come up empty.
I am not telling you to be reckless about it. Mortgages are real. Benefits are real. But I would like you to be honest with yourself about whether you are in the right room.
Because the fundraisers who thrive long-term are almost always the ones for whom the work is personal, not just professional. Find the mission that would keep you up at night if it went underfunded. Then go raise money for what matters most.
Third: nobody tells you how personal it gets.
Donors will share things with you that they have not told their families. You will sit across from someone who just received a diagnosis and wants to make a gift because the mission suddenly feels urgent in a way it did not before. You will be invited into grief, into gratitude, and into the complicated territories of wealth and legacy.
You will need to hold those moments with professionalism and with humanity at the same time. You will not always get the balance right. Neither does anyone else. But you will need to develop a practice for it, whether that is supervision, journaling, peer community, or simply recognizing when you need to decompress before you take the next conversation.
No one trained you for this part. Most of us had to figure it out on our own or on the fly. You do not have to.
Fourth: your “no” matters as much as your “yes.”
The sector will teach you how to cultivate, ask, and steward. It will spend far less time teaching you when to walk away or to pivot.
But discernment is a skill, and it may be one of the most important ones you develop. Knowing when a role is not right for you. Knowing when a donor relationship has crossed a line. Knowing when an organization’s culture will cost you more than the opportunity is worth.
Early in a career, everything feels like it has to be a “yes’. The resume, the reference, the relationship you cannot afford to lose. But the fundraisers who last are not the ones who said yes to everything. They are the ones who learned to tell the difference.
Trust your instincts. Develop them deliberately. And give yourself permission to say “no” before circumstances say it for you.
Fifth: the loneliness is real, and it is survivable.
You will know things you cannot share. You will be trusted with things that were never meant to travel beyond the conversation in which they were shared. You will sometimes be the only person in a room who understands what it actually took to close a gift, and you will have to smile and let someone else take the credit.
You will also sit in a strange space between staff and leadership, between the organization and its community of donors. You will be close to the CEO in ways other staff are not. You will be trusted with things. And you will sometimes feel profoundly alone in that trust.
This is not a sign that something is wrong with your organization, though sometimes it is. Most of the time, it is just the nature of the work.
Find your people. Early. On purpose. A mentor who has done this longer than you. A peer who is at the same stage of their career. A professional community outside your organization where you can be honest. The field is small, and the conferences are the same, and you will run into these people for the rest of your career. Invest in those relationships now.
Sixth: protect your integrity as if it were the only currency you have.
Because it is.
Relationships in this field travel. Your reputation arrives before you do and stays after you leave. There is almost nothing you can accomplish with a compromised reputation that is worth what it costs to get there.
This means small things. It means not overstating a donor’s interest to make your pipeline look stronger. It means accurate gift reporting, even when the numbers are uncomfortable. It means being honest with your CEO about a conversation that did not go as planned, rather than letting them be surprised.
I have watched people make tiny compromises that accumulated into something that could not be undone. I have also watched people build careers on nothing more than the fact that everyone in a city or a sector knew that if they said something, they meant it.
Be the second kind of person. The reputation compounds.
Seventh: learn to celebrate without waiting for permission.
Nonprofit culture is fluent in crisis and often tongue-tied about joy. We move from campaign to campaign, goal to goal, without stopping to mark what we built.
Please don’t wait for the organization to do this for you.
When something works, let it land before you move to what is next. For yourself, for your team, for the donor who said yes after three years of relationship. The work is hard enough without pretending the wins do not matter.
They matter. You matter. The moment when a donor says “yes” to something they have never funded before is worth pausing for. Let yourself feel it.
I have been in this work long enough to know it will ask more of you than you think. It will also give back more than you expect if you stay in it long enough and in the right places.
The fundraisers who do this work for decades are not superhuman. They are not fearless. They are not without doubt, exhaustion, or the occasional resignation letter drafted in their heads. They are simply people who love the mission enough to keep showing up, who have the self-awareness to know when they are in the right room and the courage to find a different one when they are not, and who have learned over time how to carry the weight of this work without letting it crush them.
That can be you.
It does not happen all at once. But it does happen.
I am rooting for you, not from a distance, but from inside the same work you are just beginning. And if you ever find yourself wondering whether any of this is worth it, come back and read this again.
Then go close something.
With belief in where you are headed,
A Seasoned Advancement Leader Who Remembers What It Was Like to Be You
What’s Coming Next in This Series
The letters keep coming because readers like you keep surfacing the conversations our sector needs to have.
If this one landed, share it with someone just stepping into their first fundraising role. Forward it to the development director who mentors the next generation and never hears that the work they do to invest in others matters. And if you are that emerging leader, reading this in an office where nobody has ever said these things out loud, consider this your permission to start asking for what you need.
If you missed the earlier letters in this series, you can find them at When Good Fundraisers Leave: A Letter Series for Nonprofit Leadership, When Good Fundraisers Leave: To the Board Member Who Meant Well, and To the CEO Who Finally Showed Me the Way.
If you are ready to stop guessing and start leading with confidence, Getting to the Yes: A Guide for the Fundraising Professional was written for this moment in your career.